Mark Chen

About Me

I'm an undergraduate student in the Theoretical CS at Columbia, anticipated to graduate in May 2026, with some exposures to math and physics (courseworks).

I'm broadly interested in anything theory-related. As of now, I'm actively thinking about:

improving the privacy decay of a fairly general class of adaptive differentially private algorithms.

applying variants of interactive proof systems to get hardness and separation results (under assumptions).

Outside of theory, I worked at Google as a software engineering intern as well as a few start-ups and VCs with an engineering focus (work experience).

My email is yc3879-at-columbia-dot-edu.

Trivia

I spent two summers in high school painting and drawing. I still do casual drawings from time to time. I also play basketball and tennis for fun, though these have been hard since I came to New York... I enjoy walking around, getting coffee and boba.

My great grandfather was a Chinese history scholar whom I spent a lot of time with before high school. As a scholar, he was a target of the "Laogai" for decades. I always remember him as the knowledgeable and positive man who couldn't stop talking about history in front his wall of books printed from his scholarly days in 1930s/40s, survived by his hiding and protection. This memory of him not only lived on in my habit of reading wikipedia pages about Chinese history all the time, but also in my pursuit of theory. For trivia, I can match most Gregorian years to their corresponding Chinese era names.

For various reasons, I've moved around a lot through my life (mostly by myself other than when I go home). Originally from Ningbo, China, I've lived in, studied and/or worked at the following places for extended time periods:

In China: Ningbo (where I grew up), Shanghai (where my mom's family is), Beijing (for most of my gap year in 2020-21).

In the States: Machester / Auburn, New Hampshire (for one year of middle school); Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (for high school); New York City, New York (for college); San Francisco Bay Area (for three summers at Google).

I like languages. I'm fluent in English and Mandarin, took Latin to the AP level, and am currently trying to learn French and Russian.